Pourin Down Rain

The 30th anniversary edition of Cheryl Foggo’s landmark work about growing up Black on the Canadian prairies Cheryl Foggo came of age during the 1960s in Calgary, a time when a Black family walking down the street still drew stares from everyone they passed. She grew up in the warm embrace of a community of extended family and friends, with roots in the Black migration of 1910 across the western provinces. But as an adolescent, Cheryl struggled against the negative attitudes towards Blackness she and her family encountered. She struggled against the many ways she was made to feel an outsider in the only place she ever knew as home. As Cheryl explores her ancestry, what comes to light gives her the confidence to claim her place in the Canadian west as a proud Black woman. In this beautiful, moving work, she celebrates the Black experience and Black resiliency on the prairies.

The first multi-genre historical anthology of Alberta writing since 1979, this long-overdue anthology explores what writers--past and present--can tell us about what it means to be Albertan--and Canadian.

Albert Sparks Jr. was born in 1929, the only child of Albert and Mamie Sparks. The Sparkses were good people, non-educated, and much influenced by the southern rural, fundamentalist Protestant Church. Two years later, in early Depression times, they built a small brick home in Bodenheimer, a community about 10 miles from Winston-Salem, NC. Albert Jr. was reared in that home-centered, church focused environment, and at age 10 he became a member of Royal Ambassadors, a boys organization at Bodenheimer Baptist. Still a member even now, his leader is a maudlin, highly emotional lady, a teary and true daughter of the Lord. And then, a fellow RA offered him the opportunity to become a paperboy. A new life began! Albert Jr. had a route of 65 Bodenheimer customers, more or less. Every afternoon on his rounds he heard stories...Calvin Butner and his bootlegging, hauling white likker in a Nehi drink truck; Hub and Estelle Doty and their marital problems, and their strange succession of partners. Some stories have follow-up chapters, such as the German POW who walked away from a work detail. A key to the stories is Wellman’s Store, where Albert Jr. meets the truck with his daily bundle of Tribunes. Every day he talks with Cece and Ella Mae Wellman about war news, and he hears gossip from the Ladies News Table. Most chapters have the date and a few headlines from that day’s paper. In the final chapter, on the night of V-J Day, he met “the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen”, 15 years old, and ‘so-o-o soft’. Actually, she’s the RA leader’s niece. And they celebrated V-J Night, or at least they started. “I prob’ly won’t go back to RA’s.”

SPUR AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ROD MILLER RAWHIDE ROBINSON RIDES THE RANGE: TRUE ADVENTURES OF BRAVERY AND DARING IN THE WILD WEST Was Rawhide Robinson really there when the Grand Canyon came to be? Is he responsible for Pikes Peak? And how about riding horseback to Hawaii? Although an ordinary cowboy in every respect, Rawhide Robinson lays claim to these extraordinary accomplishments, and more. While on a trail drive from Texas to Dodge City, he regales his cowboy companions with campfire tales that entertain and amuse, inspire awe, and invite skepticism. Saddle up and ride along. Then, at the end of the day, after a cowboy supper of beans, bacon, biscuits, and scalding coffee, sit back and relax around the campfire while Rawhide Robinson launches into another extraordinary—and true—adventure of bravery and daring in the Wild West.

Readers are often surprised to learn that black writing in Canada is over two centuries old. Ranging from letters, editorials, sermons, and slave narratives to contemporary novels, plays, poetry, and non-fiction, black Canadian writing represents a rich body of literary and cultural achievement. The Black Atlantic Reconsidered is the first comprehensive work to explore black Canadian literature from its beginnings to the present in the broader context of the black Atlantic world. Winfried Siemerling traces the evolution of black Canadian witnessing and writing from slave testimony in New France and the 1783 "Book of Negroes" through the work of contemporary black Canadian writers including George Elliott Clarke, Austin Clarke, Dionne Brand, David Chariandy, Wayde Compton, Esi Edugyan, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Lawrence Hill. Arguing that black writing in Canada is deeply imbricated in a historic transnational network, Siemerling explores the powerful presence of black Canadian history, slavery, and the Underground Railroad, and the black diaspora in the work of these authors. Individual chapters examine the literature that has emerged from Quebec, Nova Scotia, the Prairies, and British Columbia, with attention to writing in both English and French. A major survey of black writing and cultural production, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered brings into focus important works that shed light not only on Canada's literature and history, but on the transatlantic black diaspora and modernity.

These tensions are revealed in the literature that Clarke argues to be - paradoxically - uniquely Canadian and proudly apart from a mainstream national identity."--BOOK JACKET.

The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of “black prairie” literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century. This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like. It collects varied and unique work by writers who were both conscious and unconscious of themselves as black writers or as “prairie” people. Their letters, recipes, oral literature, autobiographies, rap, and poetry- provide vivid glimpses into the reality of their lived experiences and give meaning to them. The book includes introductory notes for each writer in non-specialist language, and notes to assist readers in their engagement with the literature. This archive and its supporting text offer new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities by expanding the nation’s and the region’s archives. They enrich our understanding of black Canada by bringing to light the prairies' black histories, cultures, and presences.